And this is why you don’t poison your father before he’s done teaching you how to be a cold and ruthless despot. (Also why I won’t ever tell my son “Son, you have now learned everything I have to teach you about being cold, ruthless and despotic”).

Reality is, in a sense, just a step removed from a fiction that isn’t taken seriously enough by anyone to act it out.

Honestly, complaining about surrealism in a work of fiction is like complaining that you’re bored when you have an exciting source of entertainment right in front of you, and nothing to stop you from enjoying it but your own dry personality.

While the end result may look similar for the country (i.e. ruin, shame, unrest, etc.) Taro has nothing in common with the individual you allude to, except cocky arrogance and perhaps that his physical age is comparable to the other’s mental age. Taro’s actually very intelligent, but also very evil and ruthless.

“Hey, dude – I know how to do this so don’t worry about me. My daddy told me how, just like he told me about the bardic magic.”
“Uhhh … yer Pop told you that the tooth sprite, the dire Easter Hare and Saxemas Clause were real too … AND WE ALL KNOW HOW THOSE TURNED OUT.”

You jest, sir/madam, but you are close to the truth.
As in real life, guards in full livery are as much for show as for security. Pageantry, very important.
Note how one is left-handed while the other is right-handed. They are symmetrical. Very aesthetic.

Presumably, there are already guards aligned along the walls in the corridor Taro is storming in. And in the each room branching from there. And the next ones.
At some point, they may run out of guards and the ones in the throne room may have to rush along secondary corridors to position themselves in a room before Taro enters it. Behind-the-scene Versailles was a bit like this, when the king Louis XIV was taking a stroll in his domain, especially in the gardens.

Great idea. Because adding more subjugation is certainly not going to make people profess their loyalty on the surface while wanting, deep down, to stick it to you at the first reasonable chance they can get away with it. And if any such deep feeling of resentment was to somehow develop, against all odds, in response to your repression, it’s certainly not going to be something that bardic magic could exploit on the basis of your own thinking. Not at all. There is certainly no flaw with this plan that I can see.

That would be sweet, but I think getting stabbed with a poison needle is more likely. I’m not sure the creators of this strip really want to depict even the gruesome aftermath of a beheading when a child is involved, but accidentally poisoning himself would be fitting.

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